I rarely use Yahoo but when I do visit I am always surprised by their front page. I personally believe that it is configured in a way to trick users to clicking on sponsored content which is blended in with the news headlines. I’ve been online since | Continue reading
SEO agencies and personal injury lawyers in California who pay attention to who is linking to them in Google Search Console have been discovering a huge surge in backlinks recently beginning in 2017. I believe most of this started around March and surged in June and July. | Continue reading
Late on Thursday, August 3, 2017, Google rolled out a new feature right at the top of search results for "mobile friendly test" queries. | Continue reading
Not every WordPress update goes as expected. WordPress websites can have a variety of problems, especially when there are incompatible themes or plugins. Some errors include the site being stuck on scheduled maintenance screens, white screens of death, or a website looking comple … | Continue reading
Today I spent a little bit of time poking around in Bing’s local results. I rarely visit Bing although I do drop by from time to time to stay on top of how they are ranking what and to check in on their local results. Looking at | Continue reading
If your business allows potential customers to SMS message you via text messages or Google Allo there is a neat new feature you may want to take advantage of: messaging. Once configured, customers and potential clients who find your business listing on Google using a mobile devic … | Continue reading
Fiddling with my phone I saw a new feature this past weekend. It came and went a few times which means that Google is testing it out and I happened to hit their servers during the test. The new layout includes a card-like (aka boxed) layout which | Continue reading
Today I was punching in a very random search and noticed the local pack down at the bottom of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). The local pack popped up underneath position #8, with 2 more organic listings underneath the pack. I was able to duplicate this | Continue reading
If someone attempted to open a credit card using your social security number (SSN) on June 30, 2017, please reach out to me. You can comment below or call or email me. I will be happy to keep your information confidential. You have likely been a victim | Continue reading
Step by step instructions on how to add links to your snaps and answers to frequently asked questions about measuring traffic. | Continue reading
On July 5, 2017, Google AdSense released “Native Ads”. The announcement claims that the new suite of ad formats will help ads match the look and feel of a website providing a “great user experience“. The problem with this is, ads which blend in with a website’s | Continue reading
Keyword density is a term content creators used long ago to measure the number of times keywords were used in their content. Repeating keywords over and over very rarely affects rankings although if it does affect rankings it will decrease a page’s rankings. This is because it | Continue reading
At a baseball game tonight I saw a teenage girl whose ex-boyfriend located her down to the seat she was sitting in because her bitmoji was displaying her exact location, and it made m wonder the same thing millions of other people are wondering: is this safe? | Continue reading
Businesses can now use Google Posts to add posts to their knowledge panel and promote specials, events, promotions and make reservations. | Continue reading
Snapchat Spectacles Version 2 will likely feature Augmented Reality (AR) based on the fact that Snap’s “World Lenses” feature already displays AR via mobile devices and a patent application from 2015 reveals designs of AR integrated glasses. However, this is not guaranteed and th … | Continue reading
Recently I saw a website taken offline. This was a website which performed extremely well for a variety of highly competitive key phrases. I won’t “out” the site here but I just happen to have screenshots of the site’s performance in Google search up until the day | Continue reading
If you are attempting to recover content off of a deleted domain or an old website, the Wayback Machine can be a lifesaving resource. And other times it can be extremely frustrating. Error: Page cannot be displayed due to robots.txt. Sometimes a website displays just fine one | Continue reading
The Republic of the Philippines is a sovereign democratic nation consisting of more than 7,200 islands in the western Pacific Ocean. It’s three geographical divisions are the islands of Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. The country’s three largest cities are Manila on Luzon, Cebu … | Continue reading
One of the most overlooked ways to obtain links to your important pages is from other pages on your own website. The majority of the SEO industry has no idea that this “trick” exists. This isn’t necessarily a trick, though. You SHOULD link back to important pages, | Continue reading
When Snapchat was first created, it lacked one component that all other social media sites were built on: the ability to post content to all a user’s followers at once. A user could send a “snap” to each of their friends individually, but they could not post | Continue reading
Mere moments ago, I discovered the Snapchat story search. An interesting new feature that Snapchat has launched to help navigate its extremely popular Snapstory feature since millions of snapstories are posted every single day. And after my first encounter, I must say that people … | Continue reading
There is no doubt in my mind that Google is well aware of the authors contributing to sites like Forbes, HuffPost, Engadget and all the others solely to obtain a link. I believe that is what they were hinting at today when they put out an article | Continue reading
The Bing Business Bot is here and it is likely only a matter of time before Google rolls out their version of a chatbot. | Continue reading
Artificial Intelligence is being used to answer people's questions directly from search results via the Bing Business Bot. | Continue reading
If you’ve read some of the more recent posts on this blog you probably know that I’ve worked with a few publishers. This isn’t my main niche but I have indeed broken some interesting news over the last several months: Google “In The News” Replaced with “Top | Continue reading
A site that I established in 2001 has several popular pages. Over the years, many of the pages accrued hundreds of natural inbound links. I had absolutely nothing to do with these links, they were 100% natural. In fact, I didn’t learn of the source websites linking | Continue reading
It never ceases to amaze me when people are willing to delete content. Today I discovered a California law firm which had recently deleted hundreds of articles from their blog. This was great content which is extremely valuable in the right hands. It just so happens I | Continue reading
Backlinks are a funny thing in Google and they have definitely evolved over the years. They changed in 2016, how, nobody can completely pinpoint. I’d argue that Google engineers themselves can’t totally predict how a certain link will affect rankings. I do know that I have seen | Continue reading
A publisher that I recently did some consulting for was losing traffic in Google organic search results. They had a half a dozen issues which I quickly spotted and resolved. One of the problems was that the content from their news articles was being stolen shortly after | Continue reading
In the wake of numerous violent broadcasts on Facebook’s live stream platform, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he is working hard to re-vamp his company’s video screening process. To do this, Zuckerberg said Facebook will hire and train 3,000 employees to monitor and censor vi … | Continue reading
Yesterday, May 3, 2017, the news broke that Wicked Weed is selling to Anheuser-Busch. Lots of people congratulated Wicked Weed, and plenty of people had negative things to say. This is because Wicked Weed has a massive fan base who LOVE them. On Facebook, the announcement had | Continue reading
Very few Americans trust the mainstream media nowadays. According to a Pew Research Center study, an abysmally low 18 percent of Americans have “a lot” of faith in national news agencies. That number is only expected to go further down as the years wane on. All news | Continue reading
Google’s Answer Boxes, aka Featured Snippets, have been showing up in more and more search results lately, and I’ve been on a binge, obtaining as many of these as possible for clients, trying to steal existing answer boxes and positioning new content for future snippets. In April | Continue reading
A good YouTube video can be posted onto YouTube. It will show up in video search results, can show up in Google search results, can be embedded in your articles on your website, and can also be shared on other platforms such as Facebook. Added in with | Continue reading
What do you think about how Google quality raters rate alternative news websites? | Continue reading
For some search queries, Google displays a “Top Stories” section above search results, replacing what used to be “In The News”. What is The Google Top Stories News Algorithm? The Google Top Stories News Algorithm determines which articles are displayed in Google’s “Top Stories Ca … | Continue reading
A Yelp”Active Cleanup Alert” is displayed by Yelp when Yelp’s user support team sees signs of controversial, media-fueled activity on a business page. The Active Cleanup Alert prevents users from leaving reviews and directs Yelp users to post any and all thoughts on “Yelp Talk”, … | Continue reading
About a month ago I wrote about “Spammy Structured Markup” messages being sent out via Google Search Console. Since then I have now seen multiple sites with this “penalty”. It isn’t much of a penalty, sites affected simply have their review stars removed in search results. These | Continue reading
Here’s an odd feature that is new to me that I’ve never seen in Google search results before- Categories. They act sort of like “Google breadcrumbs”, if you will. Here’s a screenshot, which you can (currently) duplicate by searching for German Shepherd Health Problems: The search … | Continue reading
Below are my current thoughts, as of 2017, as to how Google interprets what I call “geographical relevance”. If you are looking for a highly technical whitepaper citing Google documents, this isn’t it. Move along, ’cause you will be disappointed. But, Google has no word on this, | Continue reading
Adding city pages for your business’s products or services can bring in more search traffic and paying customers, but if they are “doorway pages” or not depends on a variety of factors. Are city pages doorway pages? In the past, doorway pages were easy to spot. Let’s | Continue reading
A few people have asked me if there was a Google update in March of 2017. The answer is yes. Currently, there are 800-1200 updates to the Google algorithm annually, as far as I know. Some people are calling it an “unconfirmed” algorithm or something as well, | Continue reading
Twitter got rid of the Egg as the default user account. Or did they?? | Continue reading
The Million Dollar Advocates Forum is a website with members who are personal injury lawyers and trial attorneys who have won million dollar or multi-million dollar verdicts. I have several clients who are members of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, and I end up on the site | Continue reading
If you are surprised to see an HTTPS version of your website in search results, this is why. | Continue reading
I have been documenting here the recent changes taking place in Google Local 3 Packs this year. As of March 16, 2017, I am now seeing on desktop what I previously only noticed in Mobile search results: images in the local pack. Here is a screenshot I | Continue reading
I have written about the new images appearing in local packs quite a few times now. Google first began testing this in January 2017. They also began testing “4 packs” (3 local results + 1 ad) in mobile search results this year too. Now I am finally | Continue reading
As of 2017 there is a lot of questionable news out there. You never know what will surface in search results. While Google’s results are fairly accurate there have been many infamous examples of search results which serve up incorrect information which goes against scientific con … | Continue reading